Inside Health

METRO BRIEFING | NEW JERSEY; Newark: Some Progress at Medical School

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

Published: January 4, 2008

New Jersey's state medical school has improved its accounting and billing practices in the two years it has been under federal supervision, but still lacks the ability to investigate fraud allegations aggressively, according to a monitor's final report, released Thursday. The school, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, has been under supervision since 2005, after revelations that school officials had been overbilling Medicare by tens of millions of dollars, giving hundreds of millions of no-bid contracts to politically connected vendors and offering jobs based on patronage. The monitor, Herbert Stern, said in his report that those practices have stopped and that the school ''can now conduct its business honestly and legally,'' but urged the university to correct problems in its office of compliance and ethics. Anna Farneski, a university spokeswoman, said it was developing more robust internal monitoring procedures.